Dear algorithm, I’m breaking up with you

I recently had a conversation with a stranger who was going on vacation to my city. When I heard he was headed there, and that it was going to be his first visit, I excitedly asked him what he’s looking forward to visiting. His reply, just as eager as my question, was a short one: he had no idea, because he would ask ChatGPT for a full itinerary once he arrived. The lack of spontaneity and interest, paired with the full trust in an AI agent that would no doubt offer him the most surface-level, generic guide to my city made me sad.

How does this link to music? Well, if we’re starting to source our holiday itineraries, grocery lists and other practical things from AI, two things will happen. First, everyone’s going to have the same exact homogenised life. We’ll all visit the same landmarks, take the same photographs and then go stand in line at the one restaurant that got recommended to everyone. Second, it will be easier, if not inevitable, to get the more emotional, unique parts of your personality influenced by AI suggestions as well. Things like your sense of style, humour and music taste. And you don’t have to ask ChatGPT “What should I listen to today?” for that to happen.

Streaming platforms use algorithms and machine learning to recommend songs that “you might like”. Sometimes they might hit the mark, but most often the songs suggested have less to do with your taste and more to do with how much labels are willing to invest in their promotion. Let’s say you start digging deeper, you don’t want to take the first picks that your streaming service offers you. So you dive into some playlists. But you’re not in the clear yet: editorial playlists on Spotify, for instance, are less and less curated by people and more and more outsourced to algorithms, once again influenced by major labels and major budgets. Did you ever see that little tag called ‘for you’ at the bottom of a playlist? What makes them yours, at the end of the day, if you have no memories attached to them? If algorithms and labels specifically put them there, ‘for you’ and for millions of others?

And if everything has a bias, how do you reconnect with that joy of finding a song that feels like it’s fully new and fully yours? I propose we go back to the core of what music is: connection, empathy and emotion. Three things that ChatGPT will never experience (except for connection to the internet). I encourage you to be intentional with your discovery, actively seek out music, attentively listen to it and form your own opinions around it. Up next I wrote some actions that will flex your spontaneity muscle and put the discovery process back into your own hands, away from corporate platforms and robotic platitudes.